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Morse Invents the Wireless Telegraph

Morse Invents the Wireless Telegraph by Bob Lochte,author of the upcoming book on wireless pioneer Nathan Stubblefield Murray State University

 

It was an embarrassing distraction that Samuel F.B. Morse didn't need. He had enough trouble trying to create interest in and raise capital for his great obsession, the telegraph. But Morse had to face the facts. His submarine cable in New York harbor was a failure.

 

In 1842, Morse was one of America's best portrait artists but also one of her most impoverished inventors. For 10 years he had eked out an existence teaching art, often borrowing money from his students to buy food. Yet he was consumed with a passion for the idea that had struck him on board a ship in 1832. There had to be a way to use electricity to communicate intelligence.

 

Morse had been in Europe studying art. It was his second trip abroad. Earlier, he had mastered the craft of miniature painting, but this genre found no market in the United States. So he turned to portraits and teaching for his livelihood. On his second journey, however, he dabbled in the new science of electricity, an interest that would lead him to his most noted achievements.

 

In England, Charles Wheatstone and others were pursuing electrical telegraphy. To compete with these efforts, Morse enlisted the aid of Joseph Henry, America's foremost physical scientist, to learn more about electricity and electromagnetism. Merely turning the electrical circuit in a wire was not enough. To receive a message, a telegraph operator must be able to interpret a sequence of ons and offs as words. To this end, Morse devised the code of dots and dashes which bears his name. Morse Code had an elegant simplicity lacking in the Wheatstone system and became the international telegraph language, perhaps a contribution more consequential than Morse's telegraph itself.

 

But all this was in a future that Morse could not see clearly in 1842. It had been seven years since he built his first working telegraph. So far he had been unable to convince either investors or politicians of the invention's potential value. Now he faced another barrier, a physical one. It was comparatively easy to build an overland telegraph. All you needed was a right of way for poles or a trench to run the wire. But what happened when you reached a body of water too wide to span with a single run between two poles? Morse reasoned that the best solution would be to insulate the wire and run it underwater.

 

He chose New York harbor to test his idea. There he could also attract attention and perhaps investment. He planned to transmit and receive messages between the Battery, at the south end of Manhattan Island, and Governor's Island, about 1 mile distant. The first challenge was to make a waterproof cable. Wire itself was a rare commodity in 1842, so he first had to find a metalsmith who could draw a strand of 2 miles continuous length that the project required. Then Morse had to wrap it by hand "with hempen threads well saturated with pitch, tar, and surrounded with India rubber." Then he had to carefully coil the brittle cable so as not to damage the insulation nor break the wire and load it into a rowboat.

 

Next, Morse and an assistant had to row across the channel while slowly unrolling the cable and letting it settle to the bottom with enough slack so that it would not be an obstacle in the shipping lane. As they went along, they inspected every inch for cracks in the insulation, patching the cable with raw rubber everywhere that the corrosive salt water might seep in. They worked all day and well into the night. Finally, the task complete, Morse rowed back to the Battery, and they tested transmission and reception. It worked.

 

The next morning, October 19, the New York Herald announced the demonstration:

 

This important invention is to be exhibited in operation at Castle Garden between the hours of twelve and one o'clock today. One telegraph will be erected on Governor's Island, and the other at the Castle, and messages will be interchanged and orders transmitted during the day. Many have been incredulous as to the powers of this wonderful triumph of science and art. All such may now have an opportunity of fairly testing it. It is destined to work a complete revolution in the mode of transmitting intelligence throughout the civilized world.

 

With such a build-up, it's no wonder that a crowd of curious onlookers had assembled by the time Morse arrived at mid-morning. With Leonard Gale manning the instrument on the island, Morse commenced his demonstration. He sent a few characters and received a few back. Then, as the instrument was in the midst of punching dots and dashes into the paper tape, the line went dead. Unable to restore the circuit, Morse had to cancel the demonstration, much to the delight of the derisive and jeering crowd. What went wrong?

 

Peering out into the harbor, Morse saw the answer. Several ships were anchored between the Battery and Governor's Island. One of them had weighed anchor and hooked the cable in the process. Mistaking it for a rope, the sailors had cut it away. Morse had no immediate way to repair the physical or the public relations damage. Fortunately, since there was yet no telegraph to disseminate the news widely, the negative publicity was confined to New York.

 

Morse licked his wounds and pondered the problem for the next few months. He came up with a novel solution -- a wireless telegraph. In Germany, Sömmerling and Steinhill had shown that water and the earth could serve as conductors for the return electrical circuit. Morse reasoned that the body of water itself could furnish both the primary and return circuits for his telegraph, thus eliminating the need for a submarine cable.

 

In December 1842, the inventor devised an experiment across a canal in Washington DC, where he lived. He used two wires, one attached to a telegraph key and a battery and the other to a galvanometer to detect changes in the voltage. The ends of the wires were fastened to metal plates that were submerged on opposite banks of the canal. He tried the device on December 16, and two days later wrote to his brother Sidney:

 

"I believe I drew for you a method by which I thought I could pass rivers without any wires through the water. I tried the experiment across the canal here on Friday afternoon with perfect success; this also has added a fresh interest in my favor, and I begin to hope that I am on the eve of realizing something in the shape of compensation for my time and means extended in bringing my invention to its present state."

[For more on this experimenting click here]

 

As Morse had expected, the water completed the circuit. Although this span was only 80 yards, the next year his assistants successfully transmitted messages across the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace, Maryland, a distance of 1 mile. They learned that larger metal plates, more widely spaced, increased both transmission distance and signal quality.

 

Morse, however, became preoccupied with more pressing matters, namely the promotion of his basic telegraph system. In 1843, as he had predicted in the letter to his brother, his fortunes improved. He finally received an appropriation to build a line from Washington to Baltimore, and that effort culminated on May 24, 1844 when Morse tapped out the words: "What hath God wrought?" From then on, he began the rapid expansion of telegraph service throughout the United States.

 

Because this growth was largely over land, often following the right of way developed by railroads, there was no immediate need for Morse's wireless telegraph. He never bothered to apply for a patent. Meanwhile, improvements in cable design and insulating materials made his original idea of submarine telegraphy practical by 1866 when Cyrus Field completed the first transatlantic cable. Other electricians in Europe and America, however, continued to experiment with Morse's simple approach to wireless telegraphy until the early 20th century. And while its transmission range was severely limited compared to radiotelegraphy, the US Army Signal Corps continued to use a variant of Morse's wireless as a short-distance field telegraph through World War I.

 

Morse Code was longer lived. It persisted as an international language for distress calls until February 1, 1999 -- a full 167 years after the inventor conceived it.

[For information on the last commercial Morse transmission click here (external link) http://indigo.ie/~cguiney/endofmorse.html]

 

 

Sources

 

Samuel F.B. Morse Papers, Library of Congress.

 

A History of Wireless Telegraphy. J.J. Fahie. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1899.

 

History of Radio Telegraphy and Telephony. G.G. Blake. London: Chapman and Hall, 1928.

 

Heroes of American Invention. L. Sprague de Camp. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993.

 

The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph. Alfred Vail. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845.

 

(For more on Morse click here (internal link))

 

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  KENTUCKY FARMER INVENTS WIRELESS TELEPHONE! BUT WAS IT RADIO? FACTS AND FOLKLORE ABOUT NATHAN STUBBLEFIELDby Bob Lochte In August Bob Lochte will release an important work on early radio pioneer Nathan Stubblefield. This book should appeal to general readers interested in Americana, as well as to wireless enthusiasts. Visit his site to read excerpts and preorder. http://www.nathanstubblefield.com/index.htm

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